A crawl reports four thousand broken links. Nobody is fixing four thousand of anything, so the entire value of the audit is in the triage.
Not all 404s are equal
A broken internal link on a page nobody visits costs almost nothing. A broken inbound link from an authoritative external site is lost equity you already earned. Sort by whether the link is internal or external first — that single split changes the priority order completely.
Inbound broken links are the highest return
An external site linking to a URL that no longer exists is offering value you are declining. A 301 to the closest equivalent page recovers most of it, costs one redirect rule, and requires no outreach. This is usually the smallest pile and the most valuable one.
Internal broken links are a template problem
Thousands of internal 404s almost always trace to a handful of templates or a bad migration, not to thousands of individual editorial mistakes. Group them by source pattern and the four thousand collapse into perhaps six fixes.
Set a maintenance threshold, not a zero target
Chasing zero broken links on a large site is a permanent, unwinnable task. Agree a threshold — no broken links on pages above a traffic floor, no broken inbound links from domains above a quality floor — and monitor against that instead.